Slalom Launches the DevOps Dojo Series In Toronto!
Staying on top of all the latest technologies can be a tough job. One could call it nearly a full-time job considering that there are so many tools and concepts being developed every single day. Here at Slalom Toronto, our Cloud, DevOps & Security Engineers are regularly exposed to a large variety of technologies and in an effort to share that knowledge and make an impact in the DevOps community, Slalom Toronto announced a new series of events called DevOps Dojo.
Our goal with this series is to offer an opportunity for IT professionals and students to practice and learn technologies such as Cloud infrastructure management and automation, Serverless architectures and CI/CD, to name a few. The first Dojo was about one of the fastest growing open-source technologies: Kubernetes!
We had around 40 people in attendance and the environment was incredible — a lot of networking, knowledge sharing, food, drinks and swag!
The event started with a quick introduction to Slalom and our motivation for hosting the event, followed by a team challenge and an overview of the technical requirements for the challenge. The first part of the event took around 15–20 min.
After all the requirements were presented, attendees were split in six teams of 5 or more people and sent to meeting rooms in our office to work on a solution for the challenge.
With the help of Slalom’s engineers, all teams worked on the solution for over 2 hours. The challenge involved deploying seven microservices to a Kubernetes cluster provided by Slalom and adhering to seven technical requirements. We noticed that teams took different approaches: some teams preferred to deploy all microservices first and then work through each of the requirements, but other teams preferred to deploy one microservice at a time and go through each requirement separately (per microservice). Both approaches were entirely valid and all teams managed to make their solution adhere to at least three requirements. Building a solution for this challenge that adheres to all seven requirements in under two hours was certainly challenging. However, the goal of the event was not to build a complete solution by any means, but to learn as much about Kubernetes as possible. Everyone that arrived in our office with zero knowledge of Kubernetes left the event knowing what Pods, Deployments, Services, ConfigMap, Secrets, Ingress, Persistent Volume and Network Policies were. It was a great outcome!
After two hours of hard work, everyone gathered in the kitchen to talk about their solution and to reflect on the event.
We also discussed possible topics for the next Dojo — So stay tuned because we’re announcing the next Toronto Dojo next month in our meetup group!
I couldn’t attend the Dojo. Where can I find the challenge?
If you missed the Dojo, don’t worry! All of the challenges presented in the series will be available publicly on our GitHub (SlalomDojo). For the Kubernetes Dojo specifically, if you want to try to build a solution for the challenge, you have two main options:
- Use Minikube to run Kubernetes locally;
- Launch a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, GCP or Azure. They all offer managed Kubernetes clusters, so you don’t need to know how to build it from scratch.
If you’d like a suggestion, go for Minikube as the setup is VERY simple!
Another thing to bear in mind is that requirement 5 might be tricky to implement locally. The reason why is because both Frontend and Zipkin services need to have a public URL. However, we count on your Computer Networks expertise to work around that! The rest of the requirements can be easily achieved whether your cluster is running locally or in the cloud.
One more time, thank you all for attending the first Dojo and we hope to see you at the next event!
